Why does everyone think islamey is so *** hard? gaspard is WAY more difficult and profound; the prokoffiev toccatta is a monster, all of the transcendental etudes are ridiculous, and theliszt transcriptions norma and don juan and the liszt and rach 2 sonatas are works requiring almost as much understanding and musicality than the implicit prodigious technicality. the brahms variations and ballades are intense works of art, and the goldberg variations are retardedly hard; WE ARE DEIGNING SOME OF THE GREATEST WORKS FOR THE SAKE OF THE PRIDE OF THOSE WHO CAN PLAY THEM!!!! I am thrilled that so many people can enjoy and savor these works, perhaps even play them to a decent standard, but too many pieces are more difficult than others in ways other pieces cannot even relate! For a student of ten years a schubert fantasy might be the hardest thing to understand, but a liszt hungarian rhapsody the hardest to play; for an artist of decades experience, works like OC and the Rach 3 (maybe, MAYBE grieg's piano concerto) still boggle them mind. But if we're sticking to the topic of solo piano, how can one compare difficulty?
I have HUGE hands, i can reach from a middle c to the fsharp over an octave away, and my fingers are as nimble as the best...but i cant play mozart to save my life, my big bony fingers get in the way of themselves during the slow parts. i still say a mozart concerto is waaaay harder than the rach sonata 2 or even the rach 2 concerto! WHY?! BECAUSE ITS NOT ABOUT THE NOTES...there are so many pieces that tip the scales in terms of note difficulty and technical demands that take years to master. Rachmaninoff uses cascading chords, chopin cascading sixths, liszt his ascending and descending chromatic thirds, prokoffiev interwoven notes...who are we to judge the difficulty of these technicalities relative to one another...i can play octaves easier than sixths, but for those with small hands, those chromatic thirds which took me months to get down in don juan might have only taken a few hours of solid practice!!!
HOW ABOUT RENAMING a NEW forum, excluding these ridiculous superlatives, and just saying "stunningly hard pieces in solo piano repertoire" or "the highest tier of difficulty for solo piano works in terms of musicality, understanding and technicality" or "Pieces that are exceptionally difficult to interpret and give a well-rounded playing"...and i assure you, only of all of these topics would only a few still be on every list...and even then, would several surmounting difficulties in one large masterwork still compare to an insurmountable ONE in another? DO the technical difficulties in one negate the easier passages in another and vice versa? If a piece is nonstop action but still fallsnicely under the hand, is it as hard as say, the rach 2, which is very predictable in structure, but the hand positions and fingerings are very strange to any pianist...including rachmaninoff himself.
lets get on these new forums, because i want to see the variance in our responses...for instance, and i reuse an example...islamey is very hard to play for so many people, but interpreting it is as easy as reading it off the page, whereas the liszt sonata does not have the barrage and variation of technical tests within its structures, but interpreting the music and playing it to the thighest standard is something rarely done! THESE are the polls with which we should concern ourselves, not the contest of opinion that is ranking incomparable superlatives in a futile race to see what the infallible voices of those who havent played all of these pices say...by the way...has anyone played all of these pieces? if so, why dont they come ofrth and offer an opinion before the less-then-mighty speak so effortlessly of the mastery of the art of music and the ineffable cocnern towards proving the machismo of a piece through its raw, undeniable reputation. I want experience to be the judge on this one...not looking at the score, but comparing what one has played with what another has played and so on and so on...
Poll
Topic: Most difficult solo piece IN COMMON REPERTOIRE